Asus ZenBook UX410UA-GV544T - Beautiful, Bold, & Basic

[jiyeon]

 

Hello, welcome to my experience of the Asus ZenBook UX410-UA, I bought this laptop back in January of this year and have been using it on-and-off as a secondary portable device second to my PC, for things like travel, work, and general usage inside my house for mainly web browsing.

I got my ZenBook for £529.99 from John Lewis here in the UK, I got mine in the quartz grey, which looks more like a faint orchid violet in some lighting and a little gold-ish in others, which looks elegant to look at.

 

I got the i3-8130U model with 4GB of RAM at stock, a 250GB M.2 SATA SSD, and has a beautiful 14" IPS display. There was also an i5 model but at the time, I believe it was £700+ so I decided to go for the base i3 model, as I don't need that much horsepower for a laptop, as I don't do anything intensive, and so the design was more important for me when I was deciding on a laptop.

 

 

What drew me to this ZenBook was how elegant it looked, especially in person. The bezels are slim, the keyboard is nicely-sized, the trackpad is also decently-sized, and it looks like a solid package overall.

 

 

The keyboard has a nicely-laid out profile and has that classic Asus font and design that I've come to love, coming from my old Asus EeeBook, which had a similar layout. The keyboard is easy to type on with a prominent tactile bump with its scissor-like switches. To my surprise, the keyboard is actually backlit, with four different brightness levels, I had no idea it was even backlit until I bought my new laptop home and found the brightness function keys. They're not extremely bright unless I go all the way to level four brightness, but having a backlight is more benefical than having no backlight at all.

 

The trackpad is also a pleasure to use, it's accurate and glides smoothly. I have had no hiccups with the trackpad and it's comfortable to use that I would actually prefer this trackpad to a dedicated mouse.

 

 

On the right sideof the laptop, there's two USB 2.0 ports, an SD card reader, and the battery indicator. I particularly like this battery indicator position as it's out of the way and still remains bright enough that I can tell if it's on of not.

 

 

On the left side, it has the barrel plug charging plug (yuck), a USB 3.0, a HDMI, a USB-C, and a combo 3.5mm headphone jack. My one gripe with this entire laptop is that it uses the barrel plug charging method, I would've very much preferred that it charges through USB-C. This laptop missed the mark by a single port.

 

 

 

Since I bought the i3 version, I was quite curious as to how good this thing is at CPU benchmarking as well as light gaming.

 

I ran a Cinebench R20 run and I managed to get a 777CB score with this laptop with its 2 cores 4 threads i3-8130U, max clock at 3.4GHz, which is managed to get with admittedly uncomfortable temperatures, especially since I'm so used to the raw desktop power of my i5-8600K which got a 2800CB score.

 

It's not bad for how much I paid for it though, again I didn't buy this laptop for the performance, otherwise I would have looked elsewhere.

 

Spoiler

 

Onto gaming, I often play Counter-Strike: Global Offensive so I decided to boot it up after a quick install. I went for a 1920x1080p resolution, and minimum graphical settings, so I pushed the little CPU a bit far.

 

I played a competitive match against bots on de_cache, and I managed to get 40-50FPS on average around the map. It's a very different experience to the usual 200FPS+ I'd get on my desktop PC, and was honestly polarising to not reach at least 60FPS and it wasn't as enjoyable a gaming experience as I'd like, and as a result, I don't game on this PC much.

 

Spoiler

 

 

Next is the battery, which I thoroughly enjoyed because of its endurance for my usage.

 

A typical day for my laptop and I would be, 50% YouTube videos and 50% general web browsing - I did mention that I'm not a power user for my laptop - and so this laptop with its small lower-power i3 seemed like a good recipe for everlasting battery life.

 

In my time, I was able to get on average 8 hours of screen-on battery life, which is excellent, and I can typically use it for a day, and not have to worry about charging it for the next day. I often switch between 'better battery' and 'better performance' battery modes, for context.

 

As for when it's charging, I observed it often took around 2-3 hours to get from <20% to 100%, which is perfectly fine for me as like I said earlier, I don't use this laptop for demanding tasks and so the battery lasts a long time in my usage.

 

 

I was quite disappointed with the stock 4GB of RAM that came from factory as I would often reach the ceiling. I found on day one that Task Manager read 'Slots used: 1 of 4' and so I Googled this laptop on YouTube and found a bunch of RAM and storage upgrade videos.

 

I ordered an 8GB module for this laptop from Crucial, and installed it to give myself a total of 12GB of memory, for £40. The machine instantly felt faster and smoother as it wasn't struggling for memory anymore.

 

I also recently put my old 250GB Samsung 850 EVO into this laptop too, it was simply a case of slipping it into the free 2.5" tray.

 

 

 

I don't have much words to say about this laptop, apart from that it's everything I wanted out of a laptop that in total, I got for less than £600.

 

I obviously hate the barrel plug-style charging port, but I can make do with it, especially since this laptop is great in every other factor for me.

 

The screen is beautiful, it has nice deep blacks, dynamic colors, and is super sharp for a 1920x1080 14" display. Pixel-peeking is a no-go because I literally can't make out pixels.

 

The build itself is super premium and elegant, it's thin and light which is exactly what I wanted out of a laptop, and has a full array of I/O which is easily enough for me.

 

The keyboard is nice to type on, it's bumpy and tactile, and having the backlight adds an extra layer of usability to it.

 

The upgradability of it took me by surprise, I was so glad to be able to upgrade the RAM and storage.

 

Overall, I'm super satisfied with this buy and can see this laptop being a useful travel companion for years to come.